Samsung Expects To Sell 10 Million Galaxy S III Phones By July

Samsung said Monday it expects to sell more than 10 million units of its new Galaxy S III smartphone by July, a figure that would accelerate its already rapid growth in the global smartphone market and further position it as one of Apple's biggest rivals.

The Galaxy S III, which becomes available this week in Samsung's home base of South Korea, was slated to hit U.S. shelves June 21. But carriers including Sprint and AT&T faced delays as Samsung reportedly struggled to keep up with overwhelming levels of demand. European availability for the new smartphone began in May.

"We’re getting far better feedback on the model overseas than what we experienced with the Galaxy S II," Shin said.

The Galaxy S III boasts a number of new features compared to its predecessors, the Galaxy S and Galaxy S II, including "S Voice," a new voice recognition feature comparable to the iPhone 4S' Siri, and "S Beam," a near-field communication feature that allows users to share data by tapping their phones together or swiping them past one another. It also runs on Samsung's latest quad-core Exynos mobile processor, which can reach processing speeds up to 1.4GHz and consumes 20 percent less power than prior-generation chips.

According to the Bloomberg report, Samsung also now expects its second-quarter mobile earnings to be even higher than its first-quarter earnings, which were the highest ever for the company.

Samsung doesn’t disclose exact sales figures or comment on how many Galaxy devices have shipped to date. But market researcher Strategy Analytics suggests the consumer electronics giant sold more smartphones last quarter than any other vendor on the market, having shipped approximately 44.5 million phones during the three-month period.

Not only would this figure put Samsung 31.9 million units ahead of the 12.6 million smartphones it shipped during the first quarter of last year, but also would put it 9.5 million units ahead of rival Apple, which sold 35 million iPhones during the first quarter of this year.

Strategy Analytics also projected Samsung as accounting for a whopping 30.6 percent of the global smartphone market last quarter, with Apple next in line at 24.1 percent.